[dtel]

Please explain why the Boston public schools were not integrated until '76, 1976 that is, long after the majority of southern schools had been integrated.
Why was the city basically shut down for a week with untold rioting?
This is 1976, now explain away.

[x]

You mistake segregation in fact for segregation by law. Boston schools weren't segregated by law. Residential patterns kept Blacks out of certain neighborhoods. A tightly-bound Italian or Irish neighborhood wouldn't rent easily to outsiders in any event. Boston's current Black neighborhoods were the result of "block busting" scare tactics against largely Jewish neighborhoods that lacked the clout of the Irish or Italians. The case against the school committee was that it didn't compensate for residential patterns by building schools between neighborhoods or putting students from black and white neighborhoods together.

Bringing up bussing in Boston is hardly the last word, as the Charlotte and Richmond cases of the same years indicate. Bussing and "de facto segregation" weren't strictly Northern problems. Nor has this question, North or South, been settled. A federal judge can still impose such a "solution." The end result, North or South, is usually a flight of whites and ambitious blacks to further suburbs or private schools.

I'm not aware that "the city was basically shut down for a week." Given tightly-connected, white working-class, ethnic neighborhoods whose best asset was their local school and team, it's not unnatural that there was resistance. Someone else may know more about the Charlotte and Richmond cases of the same years, but resistance in all these cases was nothing compared to what had greeted the desegregation decisions of the 1950s in the states where the legal color bar existed.

There's a Southern schadenfreude that takes pleasure at seeing court-ordered "desegregation" applied in Northern cities. When the federal government takes actions against "segregated academies" in the South, the shoe is on the other foot.

Race is a national problem, that can't be confined to one section or another, but if one wants to cast stones, it's hard to see how the federal government could have gotten involved in these questions had it not been for the across-the-board, de jure segregation of the Southern states. Had the rebellion suceeded those states might have been able, even down to the present, to practice segregation, but it's hard to see how this would have been an improvement.